Critics reviews

Double has to be the most I’m-doing-this-for-shits-and-giggles movie De Palma ever directed... Even after all these years, Body Double is still tawdry, twisted, and smart-assed, right down to the final frame.

With the film's central mystery pretty easy to guess if you know Vertigo well, one is free to simply enjoy Body Double as an endlessly playful lark from a filmmaker interested in gratifying himself and daring us to watch.

[Body Double is] unrepentantly trashy – not the kind of film you watch while your parents or kids are in the house, or with your curtains open. But it’s also a complex, provocative suspense thriller that bears comparison with the three immaculate Hitchcock classics – Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window – it gleefully drags through the sludge.

When rewatching Body Double for the third time, its most striking element was, as on my first viewing, Craig Wasson's performance. As central character Jake Scully, Wasson turns his conventionally attractive looks into an endlessly fascinating nebbishness and awkwardness.

The "Relax" scene marks a tonal crossroads in BODY DOUBLE. Soon after, the proceedings begin to accelerate at an almost nightmarish rate and the tightly plotted thriller De Palma fashioned in the film's first half starts to unravel as the limits of internal plausibility are pushed to the extreme. If you're on De Palma's wavelength though it's a worthy tradeoff, as tension gives way to near mania.

At times, De Palma's heated 1984 thriller seems designed to piss off his detractors. But his tonal control here is masterful: His earnest classicism lives alongside his pop irreverence. The hero's obsession is treated sincerely, but the movement and trickery of the expressionistic camera always hint at something more going on, and the escalating menace is undercut by violence so garish that you can't help but laugh.

The virtue and, dare I say, greatness of BODY DOUBLE come not from bulletproof narrative or even rudimentary character development, but instead from a messier place. De Palma synthesizes a multitude of disparate references into a scathing critique of nice-guy chauvinism, critical Puritanism, and countless other -isms, all under the guise mindless genre fare.

Body Double is a cold, hard jewel of a film that takes stock of the depersonalization of 1980s American culture as manifested in porn, architecture, films, music videos, and commerce. But the film isn't a polemic (it would've gotten better reviews if it were), as De Palma suggests that the only way to survive the loss of identity and specificity of the 1980s is to adapt and find new ways to be turned on by that very detachment.

De Palma actually has the gall to combine the plots from both Vertigo and Rear Window in one big voyeur-fest and pull it off with a certain sly efficiency... Unblinking tosh of this order needs to be put on the protected list.

Once you get past the deliberately ridiculous story, [Body Double is] a fine example of the director's lush overkill style from the days before his ‘Hollywood hired gun’ hackwork and offers a redeeming thread of silly sick humour.

[De Palma's] concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the beginnings of perfection.

A sadistic, snickering murder mystery -- a horror comedy, if you will... "Body Double" twists and turns miserably between the comic and the macabre; it's definitely not dressed to kill.